Emails sent and received by Travis Fisher, an outgoing senior Trump administration official at the Department of Energy, shed light on a murky anti-clean energy network with ties to the fossil fuel industry that operates in the Midwest and nationally.

The emails were obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute via a series of public records requests to Ohio House Majority Floor Leader Bill Seitz and other state legislators involved in campaigns to roll back Ohio’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards, as well as bail out failing coal and nuclear power plants.

Fisher’s email, sent from his private Gmail account, praised Rep. Seitz’s “amazing response” to a memorandum from a Democratic colleague regarding HB 114, a bill to roll back Ohio’s clean energy standards that passed the Ohio House in March of 2017 and is now before the Ohio Senate.

Fisher’s email came just two days after Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s order that signaled the start of a hasty and controversial grid study that many clean energy advocates worried would be used by the Trump administration as an excuse to target renewable energy policies. The appointment of Fisher to lead that study led to criticism after it was revealed that Fisher had authored an obscure 2015 IER report that dubbed state and federal clean energy policies “the single greatest emerging threat” to the power grid.

Ultimately, Fisher appeared to take a back seat on the study, as the Department of Energy’s non-political staff produced a report that mostly confirmed what was already widely known, which is that the growth of renewable energy is not threatening the reliability of the power grid. Regardless, Rick Perry proposed a bailout of old coal and nuclear power plants that would have provided a windfall to the Ohio-based coal producer Murray Energy and electric utility FirstEnergy. That proposal was recently rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

"Fossil-fuel companies have spent millions funding anti-global-warming think tanks, purposely creating a climate of doubt around the science. DeSmogBlog is the antidote to that obfuscation." ~ BRYAN WALSH, TIME MAGAZINE

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